Buchanan 21 by Jonas Ward

Author:Jonas Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: the old west, piccadilly publishing, pulp westerns, ebook westerns, westerns ebook, jonas ward westerns, american frontier justice, william ard
Publisher: Piccadilly

For the first quarter-hour after she had been put back in the cell, Ellen Booth could not be really sure if the man lying on the other cot was still alive. Then he groaned, deep inside his chest, and after another five minutes she saw his hand move, the long fingers closing slowly into a fist, then opening again. His enormous shoulders stirred beneath the tight shirt after that, and he raised his great shaggy head and rolled it round and round, as if testing that it was still joined to his neck.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Ellen asked gently, then was sorry she’d spoken, for now he had to change the position of his body to look at her. The effort seemed tremendous.

“You could shoot me,” Buchanan said. “I’d thank you for that.”

“How can men be so brutal?” she wondered aloud. “So senselessly cruel.”

Buchanan said nothing, kept experimenting with joints and muscles.

“Sidney Hallett is insane,” Ellen said. “He belongs in Bedlam.”

That barber knew his business, Buchanan decided, feeling the bandage still intact after all the dragging around and manhandling. And those deputies knew theirs. Man, oh, man, what a bellyache …

“Why did they pick on you so?” Ellen asked him.

“Their feelings were hurt,” he said, finding that even to talk was uncomfortable.

“Because you helped that poor girl?”

“Or something,” Buchanan said, wanting to be polite to a fellow prisoner but wishing she would let the conversation go until another time.

“I’ll leave you be,” Ellen said understandingly.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Talk if you want to.”

But she fell silent, and the seconds seemed to drag on uncomfortably.

“Talk some more,” Buchanan said at last. “You’ve got a nice voice.”

Ellen gave a self-conscious little laugh. “Now I don’t know what to talk about,” she told him.

“Yourself,” he suggested.

“Nothing to tell.”

“Sure there is.”

“It’s mostly unhappy,” she said. “You’ve got pain enough.”

Buchanan had been working slowly to get all the way over on his back. Now he made it, and the release of pressure around his ribs made him sigh almost contentedly.

“How many laws did you break?” he asked the girl next door.

“None that I know about. I’m here as a kind of hostage for my husband.”

Buchanan turned his head to look at her.

“It’s true,” she told him. “That’s the reason I’m here.”

Buchanan considered it, filed it in his mind with all the goings-on. “I been one place and another,” he said musingly. “Good places and bad. But I got to hand it to ’em in this town for pushiness.”

“And nothing can be done about it.”

He had no comment about that, nothing he wanted to put into words. He looked away from her, stared reflectively at the ceiling overhead.

“If only I could warn Frank, somehow,” Ellen said.

“Frank?”

“My husband.”

“Oh,” Buchanan said. “So that’s who Frank is.” He smiled wryly. “Feel like I know him well,” he said. “Him and his pal Luther.”

“Don’t say that, please,” Ellen said. “Frank wouldn’t be friends with a man like that.”

“Pretty bad actor, is he?”

“From his prison record,” she said, “he must be terrible.

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